OPINION: What’s time to a pig?

Several years ago my neighbour Hughie turned up on the veranda with a basket of sour cherries. My wife thanked him and told him she would turn them into jam.

“Don’t bother with jam,” he said. “Unless you can make the glass jars yourself, you’re better off to buy jam at the store.”

I had to agree with him. “And even with free cherries and hand-blown glass jars, you still have to take into account your time,” I said.

“Time?” snorted Hughie. “What’s time to a pig?”

This is what Hughie always said whenever someone suggested a farmer’s time should be given a dollar value. It’s a reference to the ancient joke about the farmer who is running his sow back and forth every day in a wheelbarrow to his neighbour’s boar. When the neighbour asks if it might save time to just leave the sow overnight, the farmer answers, “What’s time to a pig?”

I call it Hughie’s Question and I have come to believe we have to ask it if we are to maintain our mental health and achieve anything of lasting value in this world, whether it means growing food or discovering a cure for cancer.
Science is beginning to accept that research directed from the top down often comes up empty-handed. Most of the breakthrough discoveries that change the world and improve our lives nearly always come from people who are allowed to tinker in private undisturbed. Max Planck, the quantum physicist, said that new ideas never originate from a committee but rather “from the head of an individually inspired researcher who . . . unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”

Pigs are very good at uniting your thoughts on a single point. They sense treachery the moment you step off the veranda with a plan. When a pig comes up the ramp, sees the guy with the glasses and identifies a weak spot, he becomes your whole world for that moment. And he is expert at turning your world upside down.

For a number of years, Hughie and I used to go shares on the pigs. It all started when he took the sow buyout program in 2009 and had to promise to stay out of them for five years. He missed them so much that I bought an extra one for him so that he could come and visit it. We were back and forth all summer mixing our own feed and engineering a radical new system for loading these two pigs in a crate onto the truck using chainfalls. Mostly we were just yakking and wasting time. When the big day came, the system worked beautifully and a Mennonite friend pronounced it the slickest way of moving pigs he had ever seen. We took the sides from the abattoir to Hughie’s cooler and cut and wrapped them in his shop. Actually, our kids did all the work while I smoked a cigar and Hughie played the trumpet.

Hughie pointed out that my loading system works because I have calm pigs. I have calm pigs because they have spent the whole summer snooting in the barnyard and the pasture. Snooting does the same thing for a pig’s mental health that tinkering does for a person. It absorbs their attention and makes time fly. If the modern pig industry could think of a way to make pigs as calm and genial as mine, the animal activists would throw up their hands in despair and go home.

There are moments in farming when you think that nothing you do makes economic sense at the exact moment that you do it. And you have trouble explaining to people why you do it. But when you look back over the year and you see that the freezer is full of pork and your teenage daughter has learned to play the trumpet and your sons know that you like a cigar at Christmas, it all falls into place. You also have a neighbour who is always glad to see you and you miss the pigs so much you can’t wait for spring to come and do it all over again. You feel good about the world and your place in it.

And you say to yourself, “What is time to a pig anyway?”